All posts tagged: GMAT PS Strategy

The GMAT Quant generally throws up a few problems that designed to act as speed-breakers during the course of the 75-minute Quantitative section. Not surprisingly, these questions are what are usually referred to as the Roman Numeral problems — information followed by III statements, with the question asking you identify the statements that could be true, must be true or is true. Depending upon the the question stem — could be or must be — you need to follow a specific approach to nail these questions without wasting much time. But one still has to proceed with the knowledge that these problems will take a tad longer to solve than the others since the equivalent of since almost three questions is built into one question. Advertisements

One of the reasons why the GMAT is my favourite test of all is that it is so well defined in terms of the skills tested and consistently so. One of the things that is absolutely essential to remember on the GMAT Problem Solving (PS) is that the test-setters do not want you to do donkey work with respect to calculation. The leading companies in the world are not paying thousands of dollars to hire graduates from premier b-schools to do what a calculator can do!

On the GMAT it is very likely that test-takers will encounter problems that involve pure approximation. The key to solving these problems is to be aware of two things: A. The answer need not be calculated precisely B. Eliminating incorrect answer options might be the best solution

A lot of test-takers feel that like for other tests for the GMAT Quantitative as well they need to learn a lot of formulae. They often come and tell us they are revising all the formulas in the last few days before the test; nothing could be more superfluous since very few GMAT problems actually test your knowledge of formulas apart from problems involving Geometry. What is evaluated your ability to reason in a quantitative context as this question from the Official Guide (OG) illustrates. If s and t are positive integers such that s/t=64.12, which of the following could be a remainder when s is divided by t? (A) 2 (B) 4 (C) 8 (D) 20 (E) 45 Many test-takers are flummoxed by this problem because they do not know what to do with it! They quickly realize that there is no formula they can apply and that they only have their wits to rely on. So how does one approach it?